Monthly Archives: January 2008

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I have uploaded my photos from Thursday (Day 4) of Linux.Conf.Au 2008 at Melbourne University. They are exclusively of the RepRap that was being shown off today and a gathering of people experimenting with the wireless mesh and collaborative capabilities of the OLPC XO’s that were distributed yesterday. I’ve already heard of at least 2 bugs being found through this release of machines to developers (one by Jason White).

I’ve just rearranged & geocoded all my LCA 2008 photos on Flickr into a set per day, gathered together into a single collection, which makes life easier for people who just want to see what happened on what day! I’ve updated the links on previous blog entries to point to the right set for the day in question too.

There are also photos from Day 3 (Wednesday) where at morning coffee there were LWN cakes to celebrate LWN’s 10th birthday and we were distributing OLPC XO laptops to various chosen delegates for them to go develop amazing things with (or give them to someone else who would). It was a great buzz to make peoples day like this, especially when they tell you what they could do with them!

The deed is done, the affirmation is made, photos were taken and I now have a nicely framed piece of paper that says I am an Australian citizen! I was really grateful that an elder from the Wurundjeri people came to offer a welcome to country to all of us new Australians, and I only wish that she had been able to stay to the end so I could thank her personally.

This has been a pretty special Australia Day for me, especially because as well as having my wonderful wife Donna with me we had some great people join us for the ceremony. Our thanks to Edna, Phil & Janette, Brian, Lev & Erika and Julian for taking the time to join us and to Iain for coming to visit us at home afterwards with beer and a copy of “Australian Zen“. 🙂

So Melbourne is investigating an electronic tag based ticketing system for public transport called Myki (presumably meant to be pronounced My Key and not mickey), and in an interesting coincidence Bruce Schneier reports a successful attack against a Dutch ticketing system that’s about to be deployed:

The first reported attack was designed by two students at the University of Amsterdam, Pieter Siekerman and Maurits van der Schee. They analyzed the single-use ticket and showed its vulnerabilities in a report. They also showed how a used single-use card could be given eternal life by resetting it to its original “unused” state.

The second attack is a reverse engineering of the crypto algorithm through a physical attack on the circuitry which will be a jumping off point for further attacks, I guess.

I wonder how long it’ll take for the Melbourne system to be similarly compromised ?